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A project at the ASU Art Museum looking at extinction not of animals, but of elements in the Periodic Table.

General introduction

The complexity of understanding through art. It may be imprecise, but is more encompassing that any scientific axiom. This is the strenght of artistic research. The artist can function as a challenger of assumption, this adds the ability of adaptation to society. At this level artist are remarkably skilled and disciplined: If you haven't developed an understanding and mastery of your musical instrument that is deep and rich, by the time your 16, you can always go and study to become a brain-surgeon.

Artists:

Matthew Moore, 4th and last generation farmer and artist. We design our public space to look similar anywhere, so it becomes nowhere. In a process similar to that our food marketplaces make our food abstract. Digital Farm Collective, documenting the process of farming; showing the entire growth-season of broccoli in the store.

Clare Patey, reuniting culture and agriculture through food. Projects based on participation in public space. Visualising the amount of milk a person eats in a lifetime, blow up the amount of methane you fart out. Wheat biodiversity project in London. Focusses on celebration as a mode of participation. People started to throw the hay at each-other, its now a yearly ritual. Fruit rescue chop-up to make massive fruit-salad.

Rare Earth project:

How can we go from images of Polarbears on the last chunk of ice, and go to something where you have some sort of agency in these complex issues. Being in a period when the last measurement we have is the endgame; extinction. We decide to start at the elements of the Periodic Table. The commodification of this leading to endangered rare elements. Extinction; what happens if the last person who lived in the WW1 dies, dying languages, ending up at endangered elements. Starting with Copper, just driving in, looking at the light in the city at night, that's copper wires. Some obscure 1872 law enables you to claim areas of land, not the topsoil, but underground. So they are starting a mining company that doesn't mine as a point of departure for discussion and activism. Commodification of airspace, land and mining. But also looking at the black market for copper etc.